


subordinate feelings i cast aside

by plathitudes



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-17
Updated: 2013-04-17
Packaged: 2017-12-08 17:55:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/764279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plathitudes/pseuds/plathitudes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Irene relinquishes herself and takes on a crown; she gives up her name and becomes Attolia: inhuman and hated and adored.</p>
            </blockquote>





	subordinate feelings i cast aside

Irene relinquishes herself and takes on a crown; she gives up her name and becomes Attolia: inhuman and hated and adored.

She is a queen, the queen. She dresses herself in red and gold, forcing beauty like choking down medicine, because she can wither a man’s voice with a sweep of her gaze, but she finds it works better if he’s staring at her in the first place. The gods are supposed to be beautiful. Attolia does not believe in gods, but she believes in power, and the religion of power is ritualized in awe and fear. Using the image of the gods - being the image of a god - is the quickest way to get her barons to convert to her faith. And she needs all the paltry security she can afford; she needs to be able to turn her back for even a moment, for she is not a goddess and she cannot see everything, and trust that she will not have a knife planted in it.

She ensures that her executioners always have work. Attolia carves out the price of peace in human flesh; she’d tallied up her dead every night until one night she stopped, and the names in the report that Relius gives her become just inked symbols to be crossed out. She is not a woman, the slur that her barons mock her with. She is not a goddess, a truth her subjects don’t understand. She is the mouthpiece of her country: she does not belong to herself. Attolia lives through her, and she locks Irene somewhere within, to dance under orange trees forever. Irene is shadowed and ungainly and wilting. Attolia is stronger than earth, more implacable than water, swifter than wind.

To her, Attolia’s body is more sacred than the statues of the gods, for it is a reflection of her land - it must be, if she is truly to rule. Her country rolls out to the base of the Eddisian mountains, where it flattens into hard, olive-rotted ground. It rushes straight into the sea, encompasses the proud small islands and the silt of the ocean. The land of Attolia has been baked by centuries of sun, and the very air is thick and shimmery with heat in the summers.

Eddis, by comparison, is small and rocky; hard to traverse with it’s solid, straight mountains, forested and cool. When she first meets the queen of Eddis as a queen, as an equal, she offers her advice. Trust no one; be ruthless; kill those you suspect, even if you might be wrong, because the price of failure is worse than the rot of guilt in your soul.

And Eddis - young, ugly Eddis with her calm gaze and lovely smile and loyal nobles - thanks her, and dismisses her. As if Attolia is a paranoid grandmother. As if Eddis knows far better how to rule than Attolia, who sold herself and got a country in return. Helen still looks out from behind Eddis’ eyes, whilst Irene scrabbles at her cage in Attolia’s chest.

She seethes over the insult, because dwelling on the anger is better than feeling envy for Eddis, with her tiny country with it’s devoted people. They love her for no reason other than that she is their queen, and not too bad of one, and one who doesn’t impose high taxes. That’s all the reason they need.

Whereas Attolia has had to murder her way to the crown, and then murder every part of herself that was vulnerable or weak, and still she is more feared than loved.

But better feared than overthrown.

She needs no one’s love; she has their worship and their terror, and that is enough.


End file.
